


All That is Right

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is unanchored in the two years without Sherlock, and finds himself unaccountably changed when Sherlock returns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That is Right

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** Not mine. Just playing.
> 
>  **A/N** : Still practicing…one of these days I am going to write something plotty! Unbeta’d. 
> 
> **A/N2** : Fixed my previous blunder on the name of the Hospital. I need to be patient enough to use my betas...

****

All that is Right

No one has slipped. Not exactly. He’s not seen any shadows or ghosts, suspicious figures peering out from alleys, hiding behind newspapers in cafes or on park benches. There have been no text messages or e-mails from mysterious phone numbers or addresses. No letters in the post. No blurry photographs in travel magazines with someone who _could_ be Sherlock hurrying across a plaza, overcoat wrapped around him against the wind.

In the pale of his grief, it takes him some time to realize it. That everyone else has moved on. That they are nostalgic, but not broken. Sad, but not consumed with loss. He misreads the pity at first, thinking that they imagine something between John and Sherlock that was more than what appeared on the surface. That they don’t know how to treat him, and his grief, and don’t have a status to append to him. Grieving widower? Lost friend? Inconsolable brother?

It is easy to pull away. What reason is there to visit Lestrade? To knock on Molly’s door? He is not chasing insane cabbies through the streets of London, or solving impossible riddles left by a criminal mastermind or tracking decomposition rates of fingers and toes at differing temperature and humidity levels. He is John Watson, doctor, with regular hours at the surgery while Amy Carter, the doctor for whom he's filling in, is on bed rest for two months before her twins are born.

He is not Sherlock Holmes. He never was a genius detective. He is a sidekick, a moon without its planet, a planet without its sun. There is no gravity without Sherlock. No sunrise. No sunset.

But time passes, and time heals, and time gives a certain clarity to thoughts muddled by grief. 

And it occurs to him, one day, that Mycroft should not be at all as interested in him as he is. That he is – he was – Sherlock’s flat mate. Friend. And even if he was Sherlock’s _only_ friend, would Sherlock’s brother continue to seek him out? Offer the services of the country’s best grief counselors? Give him tickets to the symphony, the best seats in the house?

The violins. The crushing violins.

A misstep on Mycroft’s part, perhaps, six months after Sherlock falls, and John wants to get away from London, from England, from the UK altogether. He has an idea, and Mycroft makes it happen, and he is in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières. And there is nothing here that reminds him of Sherlock, or of London, or of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. 

He is away for six months, then returns to London, for a visit, and he runs into Molly quite by accident. He is staying at the flat Mycroft has offered him for his two week holiday, and he ducks into a bakery and Molly is there.

It is strangely awkward. He had not seen her for nearly a year, and she spills her coffee when she sees him, and a look comes over her face he cannot interpret. He sits at her table, happy to see her after all of this time, and he wants to talk about Sherlock now, about how it is impossible that an entire year has passed. About how flat life is, even though it is full, and busy, and meaningful, and productive. 

She does not want to talk about Sherlock. She changes the subject. She wants to know if he is good. If he is happy. She seems inordinately pleased, relieved, that he is working in Africa, that he is moving on. Moving on.

She is guilty.

He realizes that later, weeks later, as he mulls it over. He is back in Africa, and his work is beautifully mind-numbing. 

He has more than enough time to think. To wonder why Mycroft is so invested in his recovery. To ponder Molly’s behavior. To begin to doubt.

Is anyone mourning the loss like he is? 

Is there even a loss to mourn? He puts together the pieces, then dissects each one. The phone call. The figure on the roof. The bicycle. The truck. The figure on the pavement. The blood. Sherlock’s face. The gurney. The stone in the churchyard. They flash by in disconnected pulses.

Is Sherlock really dead? Why is Mycroft so accommodating? Why is Molly guilty? Why did she look at him like that when she thought he wasn’t looking? What her eyes said. _Oh, John._

The death feels real enough to him, though the months have dulled the edges of his pain, and the need – the ever present growing need – of the people he sees day after day after day replaces, bit by bit, the thought he harbored in those early days. The thought that his life would grind to a halt. That there would be a purpose for him outside of 221B Baker St. Outside the realm of Sherlock Holmes. 

There is a purpose now, here in Africa, with hungry, hurting people in need of care. But there is no sun. Oddly, despite the overpowering _need_ here, he feels that Sherlock needed him even more. He wonders how Sherlock does without him now…assuming he is, indeed, alive.

He decides, finally, that it does not matter whether Sherlock is dead or alive. Either way, he is gone. He doesn’t give much thought to _how_ he can possibly be alive. Sherlock is Sherlock. Anything is possible. Add Mycroft to the equation John could be convinced that Sherlock could turn into a bird and fly away.

Another year passes. The weight is dropping off him – a stone, another half. He is working too hard, not sleeping enough. When Dengue Fever strikes, he is ill-equipped to fight it. He collapses, wakes up in hospital. Mycroft is there and it never occurs to him to question why. Mycroft simply…is. He is taken back to London before he is technically well enough to travel.

Mycroft’s people – not Mycroft himself, of course - take him to a small country estate to recuperate. He is too weak to protest. There is an entire east-facing room full of books, garden paths, a lovely sunroom with two chaise longues and a silver bell to summon tea or coffee or a plate of sandwiches. He sits in the chaise and watches the birds flit among the bushes and dully thinks that he is in a different world. A world without stress, without strife, without need or any sort or kind. Food and drink appear without thought, clean clothes and linens materialize, a male nurse serves as his personal valet. He is too weak to even walk to the toilet without help.

He is here only two days when a therapist appears, with the familiar suggestion that writing will help him handle his grief, move to that lauded stage of acceptance. She places his laptop on the table beside the chaise, gives him a pad of lined paper and two pens as well. He smiles absently. The therapist leaves and he falls asleep there, in his dressing gown and pyjama bottoms and slippers.

He does not sleep well. In his dreams, he is sprinting across a rooftop, conversing with madmen, deciphering codes, following the figure before him, in Buckingham Palace, in the British Museum, on the wild moors. He reaches out to grab the coat before the figure fades away, flies away, falls away. He catches the coattails and hangs on tightly as strains of violin music lift him like a kite. He sails, weightless, and the madness unleashed in his exhausted dream-state recedes like the tide now that he has something concrete to hold.

He wakes. The sun is low. A man sits in a chair beside the chaise. His elbows rest on the arms of the chair; his hands are clasped together under his chin. He is leaning forward, and his eyes are bright, despite the worn-out look he wears.

“Hello, John,” he says. 

John wets his lips. Sherlock Holmes has chosen this moment to come back to life.

All the things he would have done – scream, shout, cry, punch him in the mouth, hug him, cling to him, pummel his chest with angry blows – all of these things he does not do. 

He decides this is real when Sherlock does not touch him. Does not reach out and push his sweaty hair back from his forehead. Does not apologize. Does not lower his head into his arms and sob and beg forgiveness. Sherlock keeps his distance, but watches John intently.

And John is staring, processing the words, staring at the face – Sherlock’s face. 

“Bastard.”

His voice is low, raspy with sleep. 

The word makes Sherlock smile.

They stare at each other a while longer. 

“You’re back,” John manages at last.

“I’m here,” Sherlock says. Is he correcting John, or acknowledging the truth of John’s statement? 

“Where…?” His eyes remain fixed on Sherlock’s face but his voice falters. He hopes he understands the question. _Where am I? Where the fuck have you been?_

Sherlock does not answer. He lifts his hand and it hovers in the air between them. Now John stares at the hand, at the long fingers and well-tended nails. It takes an inordinately long time for the hand to move, to come to rest, not on his hand, as John had expected, but on his face, on his cheek.

John is too weak to move. Too shocked to move. Too touched to move.

The tears welling up in his eyes should not be there. There is not enough moisture in his body to waste on tears. He blinks them back, but they are glistening in the corners of his eyes, and Sherlock is smiling, a small smile, a wistful smile.

“You aren’t surprised to see me.”

John shakes his head slowly, the barest of negations. Sherlock’s fingers draw down his cheek and rest on his shoulder. He squeezes, softly.

“You gave me a scare, John.”

John wastes his chance – perhaps his only chance – to point out how absurd that statement is in light of what Sherlock has given him. No mere scare jumping to his death and staying dead for two years.

Sherlock moves his hand away, and John raises his own a fraction, so that Sherlock’s fingers brush over his as he sits back in his chair, folds his hands once again under his chin and waits.

Waits for the inevitable condemnation. The questions. The whys. The punch in the face, real or figurative.

John saves those. 

With great effort, he turns his face away from the gravitational pull of Sherlock’s eyes and looks out at the manicured lawns, the flowering shrubs, the curtain of trees in the distance. The tree frogs are beginning to chirrup. The breeze is sweet and cool as the sun sets, bathing the grounds in golds and reds. He frowns and closes his eyes. 

“Unbearable, isn’t it?” asks Sherlock. He has gotten to his feet and is standing near the windows, looking west. He shakes his head. “Mycroft….”

“He meant well,” says John. He is studying Sherlock now. Very little has changed about him, though he, too, has lost weight. “He tried. That’s what gave it away, actually. His interest in me even after you were gone.”

He does not say ‘dead.’

He waits a long moment. “Are you back?”

He is.

John barely makes it up the first flight of stairs. Mrs. Hudson has kept it for them, she says. Lovely cheque in the post, regular like clockwork, the end of each month. She isn’t surprised to see either of them, though there are tears in her eyes. It’s a bit sterile, and smells musty, but the tomblike atmosphere disappears when Sherlock opens the windows and the sounds and smells of London cleanse the flat.

John sleeps in Sherlock’s old room, and if he is surprised when Sherlock’s weight settles on the edge of the bed sometime after midnight, he doesn’t say. It was not their habit to sleep in the same bed in their earlier life, or to touch each other casually. But John cannot make the trip up the stairs to his old room, and it makes sense to share, though, he admits, it would make just as much sense for Sherlock to take the upstairs room himself.

And it would make sense for Sherlock to explain where he’s been all these months, and why he wanted the world to believe him dead, and how he _did_ it. It would make sense for John to _ask_.

But there is a weight in the bed beside him, a presence that lulls him back to sleep, that steals away the need to _know_ , the desire for explanations. 

It is enough for now that Sherlock is here. That John has been pulled back into orbit. 

If they are tangled together in the morning, it is no cataclysmic collision of star and planet. It is 221B, and the London air, and Mrs. Hudson padding around downstairs, and the smell of tea and the sound of traffic. It is all that is right with the world. 

It is all that is right with themselves.

_Fin_


End file.
